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Sunday, August 18, 2013

Kerry and Zebari meet-up

US Secretary of State John Kerry met with Iraq Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari last week. We strongly urge you to read Friday's Iraq snapshot for coverage of a speech Zebari gave the day after the meet-up. The State Department issued the following on the meet-up.

Remarks at the Diplomatic and Political Joint Coordinating Committee Meeting

SECRETARY KERRY: Well, good morning, everyone, and welcome. We’re
very, very happy to welcome Foreign Minister Zebari and Ambassador Faily
from Iraq, and the rest of the Iraqi delegation who we just met with
and will be coming in here for a meeting following our opening comments.
We’ve just had a very good bilateral meeting in which we discussed the
challenges that Iraq faces, the importance of Iraq and its relationship
with the United States, and we are going to continue those discussions
this morning in the Joint Coordination Committee.
I want to start just by noting that since the time that this
committee met last September, Iraq has taken a number of noteworthy
diplomatic strides. I visited Iraq last March, and at that time, there
was great division. Parties within Iraq were not talking to each other;
there’d been a two-year hiatus in meetings. Since then, a host of
progress has been made. First of all, Iraq has settled a number of
difficult issues with Kuwait stemming from the 1991 Gulf War. Iraq has
dramatically improved relations with Jordan. It has improved its
relations with Turkey. In addition, it has also begun to stabilize
broader relationships in the region, and we welcome Foreign Minister
Zebari’s plan to meet with Foreign Minister Davutoglu of Turkey in the
very near future in order to discuss issues of mutual interest.
We also welcome the fact that they have renewed relations with Kuwait
and are currently paying very serious amounts of money as a matter of
settling the claims from 1991. So there are significant things that are
being achieved. We also welcome the internal political process that Iraq
has made over the last months. But they – nobody should make any
mistake, and we haven’t this morning. We know there are very significant
challenges that still remain, and we must face them together.
Iraq sits at the intersection of regional currents of increasingly
turbulent, violent, and unpredictable actions. Sunni and Shia extremists
on both sides of the sectarian divide throughout the region have an
ability to be able to threaten Iraq’s stability if they’re not checked.
And al-Qaida, as we have seen, has launched a horrific series of
assaults on innocent Iraqis, even taking credit for the deplorable
bombings this past weekend that targeted families that were celebrating
the Eid holiday. And this al-Qaida network, we know, stretches well
beyond Iraq’s borders. With many al-Qaida leaders now operating in
Syria, we all need to accelerate our work in order to set the conditions
for a diplomatic settlement to the Syrian crisis. Iraq was in Geneva at
the first meeting of Geneva, and the Foreign Minister himself made
significant contributions to that process. I know that Iraqis support
the vision of a stable and peaceful Syria, and we look forward to
discussing how we can work to make that a reality.
We hope also to discuss this morning the issue of weapons flowing
from the Syrian conflict into Iraq for use against Iraqis or weapons
flowing through Iraq and going into Syria. It’s a two-way street and
it’s a dangerous street. There has been some progress in this area since
my visit to Iraq in March, but Foreign Minister Zardari – Zebari agrees
there is very significant progress yet to be made.
So this morning, we will discuss the ongoing efforts of Iran and
Hezbollah that are trying to fuel the dangerous conflict in the region
from the other side. And we agreed that we cannot allow them to play on
the sectarian divides that recruit young Iraqis to go fight in a foreign
war, the same way that we cannot allow al-Qaida and other extremists to
recruit young men from Iraq and elsewhere to join into their twisted
version of jihad. So we are committed to helping Iraq to withstand these
pressures and to bolster the moderate forces throughout the region.
Finally, I want to reiterate: Everyone at this table and all of the
people who will share in this discussion this morning share a
determination to succeed in overcoming the challenges that we face today
despite their seriousness. The United States remains very committed to
working together with the Iraqi Government to address regional
challenges, and we welcome the steps that have been taken by the Iraqis
to build a strong, democratic, and inclusive state. The Foreign Minister
agrees with me that there is much that yet can be done internally in
Iraq in order to meet some of those internal political challenges, and
that progress cannot be made on security issues alone. There needs to be
progress within Iraq on political issues, on economic issues, as well
as on the larger constitutional issues that have been outstanding for
too long. The Foreign Minister agrees that these are challenges we need
to beat together.
Our common roadmap in this endeavor is the Strategic Framework
Agreement, and that is what has brought us here today. So with this
said, I again welcome the Iraqi delegation. We look forward to having a
very constructive and successful conversation over the course of the
morning and the day.
Thank you, Mr. Foreign Minister, and welcome.FOREIGN MINISTER ZEBARI: Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Secretary. I
appreciate very much what you have said. And we are here with our
delegation, in fact, to reaffirm our commitment to our Strategic
Framework Agreement with you, also to start meeting on the Joint
Coordination Committee on political and diplomatic relations, which is a
subcommittee of this SFA.
We have together endured many challenges together, Mr. Secretary, and
our mutual relationship have continued engagement of the United States.
We’ve always emphasized the importance, the significance, of continued
U.S. engagement, which is critical for the success of Iraq and the Iraqi
people on our ongoing transformation to a stable, inclusive,
democratic, and prosperous country in the heart of the Middle East.
In recent months, as we have seen – and in recent days, in fact – we
have seen the new violence or terrorist attacks by al-Qaida more
frequently, and it has cost many, many lives. But despite all these
attacks, the Iraqi people have not succumbed, in fact, to these
atrocities, and I’m here to inform you and the Administration that Iraq
is not heading – is not crashing, and it’s not heading to civil or
sectarian war. There is a clear determination by the Iraqi leadership
that really we’ve been there before in 2007, 2008, we are not going to
go there again, and a great deal of self-respect.
The key message here: We’ve come here to seek your help and support
and security cooperation with the Iraqi Government, and in fact, in
counterterrorism and to have the capacity building for our security
forces to stand up to face to this increasing threat from the nexus of
al-Qaida and Al-Nusrah Front, as a spillover coming over from Syria,
let’s say, into Iraq. And we’ve worked before on these issues. We look
forward to your continued support. Al-Qaida is not a local threat; it’s a
global threat, as we’ve seen by the recent closures of so many of your
diplomatic missions in the region and in North Africa.
Mr. Secretary, I would like to confirm that really Iraq is having an
independent and neutral position vis-a-vis the Syrian crisis, and we
have said all along we believe that a political solution is the most
viable way forward for Syria. We kept our distance on both sides of the
conflict, and Iraq has not provided arms, money, or oil to the Syrian
regimes. We have kept equidistant with the opposition and with the
regime in order to play a helpful role, but our position is difficult.
We’ve taken your positions, your views on the overfly, definitely taken
some steps but we will do more to make sure that Iraq is independent of
its actions and there’s no influence whatsoever here and there.
No volunteers are going – no Iraqi volunteers are going to Syria with
the consent of the Iraqi Government at all. I mean, any volunteers who
are going may be encouraged by some militias, by some people who want to
fuel the conflict and the violence. But believe me, this is not the
government policy as such, and we live in a region that we cannot
disassociate from what is going on in Syria.
And we’ve seen the terrible event and atrocities that happened
yesterday in Egypt. We have ongoing demonstrations in cities in many
parts of Iraq, and really they have been going on for the last eight
months, and neither the government or even the demonstrators have
reached such a level of violence.
So once again, we look forward to our meeting with you and your
teams. And Mr. Secretary, I want to say that Iraq is a reliable and
dependable ally and partner to the United States. Thank you.

SECRETARY KERRY: Thank you. Thank you very much, Hoshyar, and
we look forward to working with you on this, and we’ll work through
these issues this morning --FOREIGN MINISTER ZEBARI: Thank you, sir.SECRETARY KERRY: -- and obviously for some time to come.FOREIGN MINISTER ZEBARI: Thank you.SECRETARY KERRY: Thank you, sir.

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